I was at Texas A&M working for the (then) Data Processing Center.
We ran MVS, VAX, and of course VM/HPO. On top of VM, we also ran UTS.
One day I was in the office of our two VM guys, who were also the UTS
guys. David Lippke had a hex view of a certain UTS script or text file
on his 3270. I saw hex 20 ... "is this an ASCII system?!?!?". "Of course
this is an ASCII system.".
It then dawned on me that, while printers and terminals are bound to a
particular character set, the rest of the hardware is not. DASD, tape,
and processor don't care. (Sans a few instructions we won't talk about
in this case ... please.)
Thank God for Princeton. Among the other things PU gave us, that's where
UTS started circa 1975.
Unix was re-written in C early on, and it soon got ported to other
hardware than the original DEC PDP-11 line. A project at PU to port Unix
to S/370 evolved into what became UTS. Amdahl picked it up and made it a
full blown product. While at first it leaned on VM, it could run native
circa 1986.
The operating system took full advantage of the S/370 and later S/390
hardware, and yet remained fully Unix. (Even in such things as the
_character set_. See below.) UTS had excellent 3270 support as well as
byte-at-a-time ASCII. They had a fabulous editor called 'ned' which
worked equally well in both modes.
Eventually Amdahl got out of the mainframe hardware game. They spun-off
the UTS business which became "UTS Global".
Along came Linux. UTS Global contributed their 3270 driver to the S/390
port of Linux. (They did not contribute their editor 'ned'. Bummer.)
You can use a 3270 with Linux on Z to get a similar experience as with a
3270 and CMS. Works!
Oh ... also ... the driver interprets ANSI X3.64 escape sequences. If
your 3270 can do highlighting and color, then the Linux 3270 driver will
handle that nicely.
Fast forward.
When I first got my hands on VM/OE (OpenEdition), I was so excited ...
until I realized it spoke (speaks) EBCDIC.
And USS? Amazingly, it was the first system to be branded "Unix 95" even
though it was (is) an EBCDIC beast.
The Unix specification allowed this. Was _character set_ an oversight?
Or did the authors hope it would not matter?
These days, most systems are trending toward UTF-8.
I eventually got over the shock and realized that USS and OE being
EBCDIC actually made sense! So now I love OVM, OMVS, USS, etc, alphabet
soup.
If anyone is running UTS, could I have a guest account? (Or AIX/ESA for
that matter, same request.)
-- R; <><
On 1/23/25 9:09 AM, Rick Troth wrote:
UTS was (is) ASCII
On 1/22/25 6:39 PM, Phil Smith III wrote:
Wow, I'd forgotten that one! Are you sure it was ASCII? I don't
remember and Googling hasn't really helped. I did find references to
needing a Series/1 to drive the terminals, but it could have been
translating?
What about UTS? I think that was EBCDIC but, again, can't quite
remember.
Soooo much effort wasted on so many things...
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On
Behalf Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2025 5:58 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: OMVS
Well, if you don't count the AT&T version that ran under TSS, there
wer VM/IX and IX/370.
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-- R; <><
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